Blog

* Update: I now operate on the following basis: in order to confirm a booking the client agrees to pay for the specified number of days in full.
Confirming a booking means potentially turning other work down, as a result that time should be paid for in full.

My freelance work often takes two forms: either I'm working for my own clients, or I'm working for an agency; helping out with a particular project.

Phew! It's been a busy couple of weeks for me, I've been down in London on a freelance motion graphics project (more on that later), but before I left I managed to work on a great project: creating the website for the Inner Vision film.

Over the past few weeks I've been working on a new motion graphics promotional video for my own website (something similar to my old motion graphics promo).

In this new promo I've used plenty of shape layers, halfway through animating I ran into a slight problem though: I'd finished animating a section of the video and found I needed to scale it up for the final version. When scaling it up I found it became really blurred like so:

Well it's more of a design refresh than anything else! If you haven't visited the site for a while you may notice some slight design changes here and there, I thought I'd write a quick post to run through the changes.

Let's start with the portfolio design - there's only a few small changes here, primarily in the width of the overall portfolio. The project tiles will now extend further across the page to make better use of larger screen sizes and help showcase my design and development work.

Consider getting some office space

When I first started freelancing I did what most freelancers do: I worked from home. It was great at first, no more commuting! I could jump into work straight away and once the day was over I didn't need to travel anywhere to get home.

I've been freelancing full-time for a couple of years now (I freelanced part-time while at Uni so I've actually been doing it for quite a while!) and in that time there's been a fair few ups and downs. As a result I've decided to put together a couple of blog posts on freelancing, nothing major just a few tips that I've found useful while working freelance.

Ever since Adobe added Cinema 4D to After Effects I've been trying to use it more and more in my motion graphics work. Every now and then I'll discover something cool & I just can't help experimenting with it!

The most recent thing I've found is the "Cel Render" effect (Edit render settings > Effects > Cel Renderer). Enabling this function allows you to render the edges and outlines of an object as you'll see in the example renders below.

I had a random idea the other day while I was looking at my current business card design - why not create a business card with a bit of a difference? Something which showcases the motion graphics work I do, something which could act as a little introduction to what I do and the services I offer.

So I decided to create a motion graphics business card! A very short gif that introduces me, the website design and motion graphics services I offer, and tops it off with a call to get in touch:

With Cinema 4D Lite now included in After Effects I've been getting back into producing more 3D motion graphics work. As a little side experiment I wanted to test out some texturing within Cinema 4D to see what is and isn't possible.
I created the text and textures in cinema 4D then imported them into After Effects via Cineware.

The first texture I wanted to create was a grungy steel look - something with a nice reflection accompanied by a rough surface.

I was recently asked to create a short tutorial for the new Computer Arts Photoshop Studio Training magazine.

The tutorial aims to provide a basic overview of the video timeline feature in Photoshop. As well as covering how to import and work with video footage, I also look at how you can create simple animations using keyframes.

I recently upgraded to the Adobe Creative Cloud & one feature I was really looking forward to trying out was the Cinema 4D Lite package within After Effects. I've experimented with Cinema 4D before, mainly just creating a couple of random objects here and there, but only ever with the trial version.

When I released Skylights a few months ago, I wanted to track how many people actually clicked the download link to give me a rough idea of how many people were trying them out.

Luckily, Google Analytics lets you track particular interactions on your site using 'Events'. Setting up an event to be logged is pretty straightforward, all you need to do is add a tiny bit of code to the onClick attribute of a link like so:

I wanted to create an Instagram style filter using the standard tools within After Effects to help liven up some old footage I was working with. After creating a few different styles I ended up creating Skylights! A set of 15 presets that you can use to help liven up a bit of old footage or give your videos a slight colour boost.